Lectures

The Beauty and Complexity of Islamic Geometric Patterns: Historical Development and Traditional Design Methodology

Lecture | December 1 | 7-9 p.m. |  Zaytuna College

Location:  2401 Le Conte Ave., Berkeley, CA 94578

Speaker/Performer:  Jay Bonner

Sponsor:  Zaytuna College

This lecture and book signing will cover geometric complexity as a vehicle for beauty within the tradition of Islamic geometric art. In addition to historical development and traditional design methodology, this lecture and visual presentation will focus on geometric stratagems for complexity, including self-similarity and quasiperiodicity.

About the Speaker: Jay Bonner is a consulting...   More >

Erotic Resistance: Latina/x Feminist and Queer Performance in San Francisco Strip Clubs from the 1960s to the 1990s

Lecture | December 3 | 12-1:30 p.m. | 602 Barrows Hall

Speaker:  Gigi Otálvaro-Hormillosa, Teaching Fellow in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric, Stanford University

Sponsor:  Department of Gender and Women's Studies

In this talk which draws on archival and ethnographic research, Otálvaro-Hormillosa employs visual and performance analyses to map out a Latina/x feminist and queer herstoriography during two historic moments in relation to San Francisco’s sex industry.

The History and Science of Paper in Manuscripts of Central Asia

Lecture | December 3 | 5-7 p.m. | 180 Doe Library

Speaker/Performer:  Agnieszka Helman-Ważny, University of Hamburg & University of Warsaw

Sponsor:  Tang Center for Silk Road Studies

Manuscripts from the Silk Road have been used as a key source in the study of religions, literature, and the cultural history of Central Asia. However, they have hardly ever been viewed as artifacts in their own right. As one of the most important physical features of a manuscript, paper serves as a means to distinguish one type of manuscript from another, and can help to determine the origin of...   More >

Churchill: Walking with Destiny: Andrew Roberts Book Talk

Lecture | December 3 | 5 p.m. | Sutardja Dai Hall, Banatao Auditorium

Speaker/Performer:  Andrew Roberts

Sponsor:  Institute for Anglo-American Studies Program Government Studies, and Center for British Studies

Please join the UC Berkeley Anglo-American
Studies Program, Institute for Government
Studies, and Center for British Studies for an event
with historian Andrew Roberts, who will be
discussing his new book "Churchill: Walking with
Destiny." Mr. Roberts will be on hand following his
talk for a reception and book signing.

Branches from the Same Tree: The National Academy on the Role of Humanities and Art in “STEM/M” Learning

Lecture | December 3 | 6:30-7:30 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Join a roundtable that responds to a seminal report on the necessary role of the arts, design, and the humanities in the future of work and higher education. Commissioned by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, the report argues that a twenty-first-century workplace needs graduates with the capacity for flexible educational models that cultivate critical thinking,...   More >

Fall 2018 Berkeley Distinguished Lectures in Data Science

Lecture | October 30 – December 4, 2018 every Tuesday | 190 Doe Library

Speakers:  Deb Agarwal, Department Head, Data Science and Technology, Computational Research Division, LBNL; Rosemary Gillespie, Professor, Environmental Science, Policy & Management; Rachel Slaybaugh, Assistant Professor, Nuclear Engineering

Speaker/Performer:  Kristina Hill, Associate Professor, Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning and Urban Design

Sponsor:  Data Sciences

The Berkeley Distinguished Lectures in Data Science, co-hosted by the The Berkeley Division of Data Sciences and the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS), return for the Fall 2018 series. Lectures feature Berkeley faculty doing visionary research that illustrates the character of the ongoing data revolution.

Maps of a rising water table: The hidden component of sea level rise: Berkeley Distinguished Lectures in Data Science

Lecture | December 4 | 4:10-5 p.m. | 190 Doe Library

Featured Speaker:  Kristina Hill, Associate Professor, Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning, UC Berkeley

Sponsor:  Berkeley Institute for Data Science

Map-based data viewers have been available for several years that reveal where coastal flooding is likely to occur as oceans warm and ice sheets melt. Recently, geologists have begun to study the influence of sea level rise on groundwater, and have concluded that in some coastal areas, as much or more land could flood as a result of rising groundwater than will flood directly from saltwater. Yet...   More >

Postconflict Utopias: Performing Everyday Survival in Colombia

Lecture | December 5 | 12-1:30 p.m. | 602 Barrows Hall

Speaker:  Tania Lizarazo, Assistant Professor, Department of Modern Languages, Linguistics & Intercultural Communication, and the Global Studies Program, University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC)

Sponsor:  Department of Gender and Women's Studies

Using excerpts from Mujeres Pacíficas (mujerespacificas.org), a digital storytelling project in collaboration with Afro-Colombian women activists, I will explore the utopian character of survival in a postconflict that has yet to materialize. These stories portray how survival manifests in everyday practices—from showing up to care-taking—, and not in massive resistance actions. I move away from...   More >

The good, the bad, and the ugly: How we decide what data to use in our regulations

Lecture | December 6 | 2-3:30 p.m. | 5400 Berkeley Way West

Speaker/Performer:  Dr. Shelley DuTeaux, PhD, MPH, Human Health Assessment Branch, California Department of Pesticide Regulation

Sponsor:  Division of Environmental Health Sciences, School of Public Health

We often have to use imperfect, messy, and even missing data in setting regulatory targets. Different agencies have different approaches to setting regulatory targets depending on the laws that define their statutory authority. Because of this, organizations may come to very different decisions for same chemical using same data. This presentation will use a series of pesticides to show how...   More >

A China Carved on Tableaux: Whitewood Figurines in the Long Twentieth Century

Lecture | December 6 | 6-8 p.m. |  Hearst Museum of Anthropology

Sponsor:  Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology

How is the crafting history of ordinary woodcarvers different from the political and economic history of elites and literati? The talk will tell a history of Ningbo miniature whitewood figurines in a longue durée, first collected by Western travelers as souvenirs from the 1870s to 1940s and then shipped to the West as export craft from the 1950s to 1980s. With a focus on the making of those...   More >

Design Talks: Nadya Peek

Lecture | December 7 | 12:30-1:30 p.m. | 220 Jacobs Hall

Sponsor:  Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation

Machine Agency: Making Machines that Make

Nadya Peek
Assistant Professor, Human Centered Design and Engineering
University of Washington

How can we harness the precision of machines for the creativity of individuals? Digital fabrication tools promise quality production in low volume and are now accessible in maker spaces worldwide. However, the maker context is very different from the...   More >

New Publications: A Reading with Stefania Pandolfo and Minoo Moallem

Lecture | December 7 | 4-6 p.m. | 340 Stephens Hall

Sponsor:  Center for Middle Eastern Studies

Please join the CMES for readings from two new publications by CMES affiliated faculty, Stefania Pandolfo (Anthropology) and Minoo Moallem (Gender and Women's Studies).

Through a dual engagement with the unconscious in psychoanalysis and Islamic theological-medical reasoning, Stefania Pandolfo’s unsettling and innovative book reflects on the maladies of the soul at a time of tremendous global...   More >

Why Diversity is Not Integration

Lecture | December 11 | 7 p.m. | Longfellow Middle School, Auditorium

Location:  1500 Derby St., Berkeley, CA

Speaker/Performer:  Prudence L. Carter, Graduate School of Education

Sponsor:  Berkeley Unified School District, Superintendent's Office

Prudence L. Carter, Dean of the Graduate School of Education, will discuss how school communities can foster empathy among people of varied social backgrounds as they teach, learn, communicate, and interact in ways that can fortify our democracy. She’ll help us think about the role each of us can play in promoting integration and educational equity.

Arthur Jafa and Stephen Best in Conversation

Lecture | December 12 | 6-7:30 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Stephen Best joins MATRIX artist Arthur Jafa in conversation to discuss the artist’s transition from the cinema screen to the gallery, the politics of Jafa’s aesthetics, and the turn toward “Afropessimism” in black thought.

Jafa is an artist, director, editor, and award-winning cinematographer whose poignant work expands the concept of black cinema while exploring African American experience...   More >

Social Justice and Health Equity - A talk with Sir Michael Marmot

Lecture | December 13 | 12-1 p.m. | Berkeley Way West, Colloquia

Sponsor:  Public Health, School of

Taking action to reduce health inequalities is a matter of social justice. We need to confront the social gradient in health, not just the difference between the worst off and everybody else. Policies and interventions must not be confined to the health care system; they need to address the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work, and age. Tackling the health gap will take action,...   More >

Registration info:   Register online

Gallery Talk: Elizabeth Sharf on the Japanese Collection

Lecture | December 13 | 12-1 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Elizabeth Sharf, a visiting scholar in UC Berkeley’s Center for Japanese Studies, offers a tour of Ink, Paper, Silk illustrating the breadth and depth of the museum’s important collection of Japanese art. Highlights will include Nagasawa Rosetsu’s engaging Children Playing with an Elephant, Okamoto Shuki’s lyrical White Swallows by a Waterfall, and examples of Obaku calligraphy—seventeenth- and...   More >

Gallery Talk: Elizabeth Sharf on the Japanese Collection

Lecture | December 13 | 12-1 p.m. |  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Sponsor:  Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Elizabeth Sharf, a visiting scholar in UC Berkeley’s Center for Japanese Studies, offers a tour of Ink, Paper, Silk illustrating the breadth and depth of the museum’s important collection of Japanese art. Highlights will include Nagasawa Rosetsu’s engaging Children Playing with an Elephant, Okamoto Shuki’s lyrical White Swallows by a Waterfall, and examples of Obaku calligraphy—seventeenth- and...   More >

SOLD OUT: Indoor Fern Collection: Ferns 101: December Members' Walk

Lecture | December 13 | 1-2:30 p.m. |  UC Botanical Garden

Sponsor:  Botanical Garden

This members' exclusive walk, led by Horticulturist, Corina Rieder, will go over the basics of fern biology, (including what is a fern, morphology & lifecycle) plus basic propagation and cultivation tips for indoor ferns.

Registration info:   Register online

Dissertation talk: Navigating Videos using Structured Text

Lecture | December 13 | 2-3 p.m. | Hearst Memorial Mining Building, 354/360 HMMB (BiD Lab http://bid.berkeley.edu/directions/)

Speaker/Performer:  Amy Pavel, UC Berkeley

Sponsor:  Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS)

This dissertation talk explores how we can combine domain-specific human annotations with automatic techniques to let people navigate videos using structured text documents. I'll talk about systems in the domains of educational lecture videos, movies, and critique sessions.

Science at Cal Lecture - Assessing the potential impact of super‐eruptions: on society and the environment

Lecture | December 15 | 11 a.m.-1:30 p.m. | 100 Genetics & Plant Biology Building

Speaker/Performer:  Stephen Self, Department of Earth and Planetary Science

Sponsor:  Science@Cal

Rare, but extremely large, explosive super-eruptions Magnitude 8 and above have occurred throughout geologic time.
If a future super-eruption was predicted, what would, or could, society do? Preparation for such low probability but high consequence events is difficult to imagine, yet some modest early measures can be considered.